The Moon Tunnel

falling to his knees, but the greyhound returned to snuffle his neck, the fetid breath of the dog on his face, and despite the otherworldly light he could clearly see her white incisors.

He made it to the crossroads and looked east towards the point where the archaeologist’s trench had cut through the moon tunnel. The ditch was empty. A clean sweep of neatly excavated earth. He felt his guts twist, knowing instinctively where his quarry had gone. Boudicca had the scent now and loped forward, still silent, until her head plunged inside the tunnel’s opening. Dryden, catching up, pulled the dog back and clicked on the torch Gaetano had retrieved from the boot of the hired car. The tunnel was clear for about twenty yards, then turned north. The police team had cleared it as best they could, but here and there the thin wooden packing-case panels had buckled, and little avalanches of soil lay across the way forward, lumps of the grey-green clay glistening. Boudicca eyed him, eager, confident in their courage.

Dryden’s life was made up of moments like this. He knew he didn’t have the courage to go on, but knew that he would, more fearful of the verdict that he was a coward. What was in it for him? He thought about what might lay around the slow curve of the tunnel. Had Valgimigli’s killer returned to the place of execution? Was the Dadd buried here? There was, he knew, another item missing from the scene: the gun.

‘Stay here,’ he said to the dog, his voice catching horribly in his throat. Boudicca whined and slumped down like a sphinx.

He tossed the torch into the hole and crawled forward for twenty feet before the first wave of nausea made him stop. He craned his head back over his shoulder and could see the distant rose-tinted square of the tunnel entrance, Boudicca out of sight. A curtain of sweat had dropped from his hairline and trickled into his eye, the salt making his vision blur.

He tried not to think of the earth above, the sand of his dream, waiting to fall like a judgement.

His hand, set against the wooden tunnel wall, left a moist print on the pine. Each wooden panel was a potential hiding place, too numerous for the police to have safely checked them all. He forced himself to look ahead where the tunnel turned to the north still, continuing its long gentle sweep. The claustrophobia which haunted him pressed in, and he found it almost impossible not to kick out with his feet, or press his elbows into the thin panelled walls, craving space and air. He rested his forehead in the dirt, and felt the despair of failure, knowing now that he would turn back. He saw an image of Vee Hilgay, slumped dead in one of the high-sided chairs of the old people’s home, and still he began to edge back, desperate for the sight of the night sky.

He raised himself on one elbow and froze; the sounds from the site were a distant distortion, but much closer was a new sound. Once, twice and then a third time, the clicking of the earth above him fracturing, a fissure opening in the sticky, soaking, Gault clay like a crack in soft cheese. He listened, sensing the movement above, and then the earth fell, dropping onto the roof of the tunnel with a deep, visceral blow. Dryden heard the wood splinter, closed his eyes and waited for the impact to crush him as it did in his nightmare. But it wasn’t the weight that hurt, it was his ears, the changes in pressure tearing at the drums. And then the almost soft caress of the trickling earth. He lay there, encased, his heart audible, waiting to die, as he felt the soil trickling down beside his neck and beginning to clog his lips and nose. A minute passed, and the panic left him unable to move. Each time he breathed he thought it would be his last, each time there was less to breathe.

‘Jesus help me,’ he said.

Detached from the process of his death he waited, his heart rate dropping, the lack of oxygen beginning to lighten his head. Through the debris he inched his hand until it found the torch, and bored it towards his face until its yellow light stemmed the panic. He held it to his eye and thought of Laura, wanting desperately that she should be with him. He buried his face in her hair, the torch beam flickered and died, and he passed out.

Azeglio had done everything his captor had asked but he knew now that he was still going to die, and that it would be here, in the trench, beside the moon tunnel. When he’d asked, long after he was capable of saving his life, she’d told him what had been in the wine: scopolamine and morphine, a mixture she’d no doubt given many of her patients. He’d felt the rapid heartbeat first, and then the bloom in his cheeks as the blood rushed to the surface, but, stupidly, had assumed it was his excitement, the possibility that she would be his again that night, as she had once been long before.

He looked around now, as though he saw the trench for the first time. He smiled with lips lopsided from the drugs, and ran his tongue, excruciatingly dry, along his immaculate teeth, tasting the blood from the gash. It had taken just two hours to remake his life, re-centre it around those few seconds in the tunnel more than twenty years before, when he’d lain in wait for his brother, killed him for love, not for money, shot away the face that so resembled his own, then reached forward through the earth to reclaim the ring she’d given him.

March 30, 1984. The day of his father’s funeral. They’d met in the old woodstore behind Il Giardino, agreed then that Jerome would go down to check what was left in the tunnel, swearing never to tell the story, so that the knowledge would die with Marco. And then Jerome would go to Italy, as he had always wanted, and try to raise cash from the family. He would go quickly, telling no one, especially Mamma, who would tell him not to beg. That they had promised, and that was where Azeglio had been deceived. Jerome had told someone: his first and only love.

Azeglio stood now before her, confused by the drugs, feeling a childlike acquiescence, the result of the scopolamine, but feeling no pain because of the morphine. He’d laughed when she accused him, and so she struck him with the butt of the pistol. His pistol, the one that Marco had left. So he said it out loud then, to hurt her, really hurt her, as she was hurting him.

‘I killed him. Right here. I loved you, so I killed him.’

The trap had been exquisite. She’d told him over the wine that she would return with him to the site, sleep with him in the makeshift office. She’d touched his face, a moment of exquisite happiness after the years of cold denial, years in which he had only to touch her to know that he had failed: failed to be who she really wanted – his brother. He’d let her drive, tossing the keys to her as they left the flat. She’d reminisced as they made their way to California, scenes from the life they once had in the handful of years after their marriage. Years in which they’d tried for the child which had been denied them. But now, perhaps, a new beginning.

Until she asked the question: ‘Why did you kill him?’

He sank to his knees, finally unable to keep the muscles taut. She watched his pupils dilate, and his speech began to weave between the octaves, searching for a note. The scopolamine, unstitching his inhibitions, inflated his sense of security, and he let the ghost of a smile cross his lips. So she hit him hard with the pistol again, and he went down and lay there crying. She led him to the end of the trench, to the moon tunnel, to a place of execution, his knees collapsing at every other step, until she could go no further. There was little light, but the halogen blue just touched his hair, like a halo.

‘So why kill him?’ she asked again.